As always, John Brandon's comments are very intriguing.
All I'm saying is that journals give a greater appearance of accuracy
and trustworthiness when (1) they are always on schedule (more or
less); and (2) when all costs are met by subscribers and the editor
(co-editors?) are not footing part of the bill.
Schedule has nothing to do with accuracy unless maintaining a schedule
obsessively contributes to inaccuracy. Many journals are behind
schedule; for example, I am a member of the American Antiquarian
Society, whose journal is two and a half years behind schedule.
The only reason TAG has occasionally been in the black is that the
editors pay themselves nothing, and the only reason that it survives
is that its editors and publisher consider it well worth continuing,
both for its history as the organ of the "Jacobus School" and for its
current influence on the field. Currently ALL the major scholarly
journals in genealogy are losing money. Donald Lines Jacobus founded
TAG in the 1922; the first time it broke even financially was in the
1960s. The NEHG Register has lost money throughout most of its 160
years, and even announced its discontinuation in 1861 when violent
political circumstances made it lose its entire southern subscription
list (a white knight rode in at the last minute). The point is that
few scholarly journals in any field make money---of course, they hope
to, but that is not their main purpose. Profit-making has nothing to
do with quality.
(As a digression, I should mention that Harper's Magazine and The
Atlantic Monthly almost never make any money, and they are both over
150 years old. A friend of mine who publishes in both magazines told
me that, when he was in New York some years ago, the Harper's
editorial staff invited him out to dinner to celebrate the magazine's
first annual profit in some two or three decades: $100! (I think that
the dinner was Dutch--)
Quality, schmality. Was the recent Whitney article a "quality"
piece ... with all of its flubs and inaccuracies?
I am aware of one misprinted date and a different interpretation of
one document.
The authors proposed a likely hypothesis. We have, however, heard from
another expert proposing a different (but similar) line of descent,
and, as I mentioned before, we expect a follow-up Whitney articles in
a 2007 TAG.
John: I was going to comment on your query about Joan Newton's
marriage and which hypothesis is more likely to be correct, but your
postings imply that discussing these two different tentative
conclusions---Bob Anderson in Great Migration and Edwin Witter's TAG
article about a decade ago---is not your major purpose when dealing
with The American Genealogist.
DAVID L. GREENE
Coeditor and publisher
The American Genealogist [TAG]